Cornelis Ketel

Late in his life Cornelis Ketel started putting down his brushes. His friend and biographer Carel van Mander, writing while Ketel was still alive, records that around 1600 the painter took to working with his fingers straight in the paint, and then went further and painted with his feet. It reads as a stunt, and partly it was, though it grew from a real fascination with how much a picture depends on the tool that makes it.

Ketel was born in 1548 in Gouda, in the Dutch Republic, and spent his most ambitious years abroad. Through the 1570s he worked in Elizabethan London, where the Earl of Hertford, a courtier, had him paint Queen Elizabeth I.

Back in Amsterdam he became a busy portraitist, and in 1588 he painted a whole militia company in one canvas, the kind of civic group portrait Rembrandt's generation would take up a lifetime later. He kept painting the city's merchants and soldiers until his death in 1616.